


the horses are coming (so you better run)

by oatrevolution



Series: don't give me up [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: M/M, Period-Typical Homophobia, and associated self-loathing (two for one deal!), and the green-eyed monster, attack of the second person, bucky barnes: olympic pining gold medalist, co-starring WWII, in which lots of letters are not written and not sent, pre- and post-serum steve rogers, probably contains some unhealthy emotional issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-04
Updated: 2014-11-04
Packaged: 2018-02-24 03:25:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2566529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oatrevolution/pseuds/oatrevolution
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Your Carter makes me want to break things, but I think she knows you too. It’s no wonder she likes you so much.  She met you before the serum, didn’t she?  Some people only see you the way you are now.  But I remember how you used to be and I love him, too. I wanted you long before you could bench-press cars.</i><br/> <br/><i>Not that I object to you being strong and healthy and admired far and wide, of course.  But if I’m going to be honest, perfectly honest, you as you were would have been more than enough for me.</i></p>
<p> </p>
<p>Letters sent: one.<br/>Letters unsent: two.<br/>Letters unwritten: sixteen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the horses are coming (so you better run)

You’re looking up at him, and the sun lingers in his hair, and it’s the last true day of summer.  It has been a fabulous last day of summer.  It’s a last day of summer to be told and retold over the years to come, held fondly in one fist, the edges worn and the whole of it slightly faded, except for the light in his hair and your heart catching in your thin, boyish chest.  These things, you will not share.

It’s the last true day of summer, and you can just feel the first kiss of winter on your cheek.

 

 

 

You go because it’s the right thing to do. You’ve seen the films, read the newspapers, just like everyone else, every other bastard in this country, and the right thing to do is sign up.  But you still talk yourself out of it for weeks, months, going on a year.

_Next time._

_Not this week, there’s still overtime at the docks, I need to—_

_There’s already a line._

_They don’t need me today._

_What about Steve?_

And that’s the real trouble, isn’t it.  What _about_ Steve? Steve, who got so sick last winter, and you had to beg elderly Mrs. Johnson from next door to watch him, because you desperately needed the money for medicine and couldn’t just quit. Steve, who won’t back down from a fight, not even when he really should, and you’re the only one who’ll back him up, save him from himself.  Steve, who wants so badly to _do the right thing_ , and he’ll do anything to do the right thing, you know he would, you’ve found three rejection slips already.

_Who’ll keep him safe if I’m not there? He needs me more than those people in—_

The day you catch yourself thinking this, you stop fast, breath frozen in your chest.  Your hands clench.

Steve, who would hate how selfish you are, how you’ll find excuses to avoid doing what he would in half a heartbeat, less, just so you can fuss over him and work twice as hard for coal in the winter and dream of the nights when you have to curl up together anyway.  Steve, who would be so… disappointed.

“All right, Barnes?” asks Red George.  Today he’s going to The Chatty Lamb—a change of pace, he says—a change from his stunted leg or his cheating wife or his stupid job, the one he hates almost as much as you do, it doesn’t matter which.  He follows you on the Chatty Lamb days and you don’t chase him off because he leaves you alone, usually.  And he lets you go with only a wave when you reach the apartment.

Red George is very good at knowing when you can’t take another second.

“Yeah,” you say.  You force your body to move again.  It’s like you’re some tiny thing wrapped up in a suit of flesh and bone, pulling levers and turning dials.  A giant meat puppet.

The next day, after work, you go to the recruitment station.

So you go because it’s the right thing to do.  But you also go because you can’t stand to see Steve disappointed in _you_.

 

 

 

It’s just Basic.  It’s not like you’re shipping off, not yet.  First they want to teach you how to point a gun at the bad guys and pull the trigger.  And they want you to learn the structure and the rules and how to do this and how to say that and how best not to die.  Life lessons, really.

Three days in, you have to admit that your primary objective— _don’t dwell on Steve, hell, don’t even_ think _about him if you have a choice, you sorry son of a bitch_ —has been toppled, razed, and set on fire.  It feels like you’ve been living in each other’s back pockets since you were ten years old, and somehow three days lacking is like an alcoholic trying to quit, like Steve’s a drug you didn’t know you were addicted to until you had to do without, except that you did know, you _did_ , otherwise you wouldn’t have tried to head off those moaning thoughts before they really built up steam.  Which they have.  You know they have, because three days in you actually start looking around for a pen and paper, and you have to make yourself stop and sit down on your cot instead.

Three days?  Pathetic.

But the letter roots around in your skull.  It won’t shut up.  _Dear Steve, Today we ran ten miles flat-out. Remember when Ms. Clark had us run laps around the courtyard before she’d let us out for lunch and she made you sit out because every time you tried to keep up you just about died?_ No, that’s stupid. Steve hates being reminded that he’s frail and weak.  _Today we ran ten miles flat-out. I think they’re trying to prepare us for fleeing before the enemy.  Ha ha.  Just messing. I survived Ms. Clark and those stupid runs she made us do before lunch, so I think I can handle a few drill sergeants.  They’re nothing on that nun who used to teach Sunday school.  Sister Alleline could teach these losers a thing or two._ That’s not bad. He might like that.

No, he won’t, you tell yourself sternly.  He won’t like it because he won’t get that letter because you won’t write it.

And it does get better, a little.  The homesickness.  That’s really what it is, you think: homesickness.  The apartment, the streets, the job, none of that’s important, none of it makes much of an impression.  Steve’s the home.

But that’s not a particularly soldier-like thought and you snip it off quick at the root.

_Dear Steve, Last night we only got three hours of sleep.  They had all sorts of horns going off…_

 

 

 

Steve’s mother dies in the spring.  The stunted little tree out back has stubborn green shoots and you snitch some flowers from a stall at the market, the day you’re remembering, and get away without really being seen.  You bring them over and find Steve huddled on the couch, collapsed in a heap, sharp angles and small, bony shoulders. He doesn’t want your pity, and that’s the only thing that stops you from taking his hand and squeezing.

Mrs. Rogers is in the bedroom.  She’s arranged almost like the porcelain dolls your grandmother had. Her chest still moves, a little. She’s awake and looking at the wall.  You know the picture there like the back of your hand—Steve’s dad, her husband.  It’s the only thing of his you’ve ever seen. You wonder what he was like. From the picture, you know that Steve has his eyes.

Her eyes focus on you after a moment, see you hovering anxiously in the doorway.  Somehow, you feel like you’ve been pushed back years, returned to the body of a skinny, gap-toothed boy, standing on the steps to this apartment for the first time, worried, though you will never show it, that she won’t approve of you.

“Bucky?” She has only scraps of voice left. She frowns.  “Where’s Steve?”

You come in and sit at the chair before you answer.  “Asleep.  On the couch.”  You fidget with the flowers a little and then stop.  You don’t want to ruin them.  “He hasn’t been sleeping much, huh?  Probably better not to wake him.”

She smiles.  “Oh, Bucky,” she says, and holds out one hand.  You take it; someone told you once, a cousin you think, probably at your Granny’s wake, that you have a good bedside manner.  You remember that you took it badly and sat in the pantry and cried for half an hour.  This was before you met Steve.  “I remember,” she says, takes a breath.  “He never… had anyone.  Except me. And you were… a blessing. You’ve been a real blessing.”

You’re pretty sure that nobody has ever called you a blessing. But that’s just a distraction, a weightless thought, and you’re able to smile a little and say, “He couldn’t beat me off with a stick, Mrs. Rogers.  You know that.”

She huffs.  “Mmm, yes. I do.”  She looks you right in the eyes and you know this is really what she wants to say, the last thing she wants to leave you with. “Look after him for me, will you? Bucky?”

“Yeah,” you say.  “I will. I promise.”  You look down and stare at the flowers, at the pale yellow petals, fragile.  They bruise so easily, flowers.  And these are only little spring ones, just babies, really.  Baby flowers.

“Good,” she whispers.  You know that she knows.  Maybe it comforts her, you can’t quite tell, but she pats your hand vaguely, leans aside to cough and hack into her pillow.

Steve hurries in, rumpled, sleep running from his body like water. He doesn’t have many more days left with her.  Two afternoons from now, she will make her final trip to the hospital, when the risk of transmission gets too high.  For now, he adjusts her blankets, thin white hands on thin white sheets.  You go to the kitchen and find a glass for the flowers. Only then do you pull him away and make him eat something, one of the many pieces of food in the icebox, from neighbors, from friends, from his mother’s coworkers at the hospital.

You glare at him until he eats every bite.

 

 

 

The gun is new.  You’re just a kid from Brooklyn; you’ve never shot one before, never really had occasion to touch one.  Your parents could never afford toy guns, but that was all right, because sticks from the park could become grand things in your imagination.  You have a vivid imagination.  Sometimes, looking back, it’s hard to tell what was real and what you just embellished or made up out of whole cloth.

You’re not clumsy with the gun, though, and it only takes a few minutes to figure out how it all works, the little pistons and levers and the metal case holding it together. It’s mass-produced and faulty in its own way, which you can compensate for, and you’re good with it. You don’t think about it at first, how easy it is.  Instinct.

What a shitty thing to be good at.  You’re good at looking after Steve and you’re good at shooting people.  Those are your two talents.  Pick one.

The army sure knows which one to pick.  You’re all enlisted, they’re not here to make generals out of you, but sometimes they do take people aside, and that’s how you end up on a different, smaller firing range, with the targets a lot farther away, and a different gun in your hands.  This one is better.  Its parts run smoother.  The sight is actually straight.  And the targets still end up, more often than not, shot through the center.  You will, you’re certain, only get better with practice.  The army is equally certain.

Someone puts you in line for promotion.

 

 

 

_Dear Steve,_

_Hello from the newly-promoted Sergeant James Barnes!  That’s right, pal, you’d better start writing it properly on your letters.  They gave me some stripes and everything so it must be official.  I’ll look quite fantastic the next time you see me._

_Speaking of, they’re sending us home in about a week, but I’ll send you another letter closer to and then you’ll know when to expect me.  I want your mom’s pie for dinner.  They only feed us healthy stuff here, lots of potatoes. One of the other guys in my tent got some cookies from his girlfriend.  He had to eat them all right then, he was nearly sick, but it was that or risk Erikson or Daniels hunting them down in the night._

_How’s the old neighborhood?  It feels like I’ve been away for ten years instead of ten days. I should be asking about the wife and kids or something.  You should hear some of these guys going on about theirs.  Or the girlfriends.  Those are the worst.  They need to write down their terrible poetry instead of inflicting it on the rest of us. Maybe they could get published and then put on a dusty shelf somewhere, completely ignored._

_I can just picture your scowl.  It’s a free country, I’m allowed to hate poetry if I want to. I’m happy to let you support them so long as I don’t personally have to read any of it._

_I’m gonna get yelled at if I keep the light on any longer. You’d better not forget that pie._

_Bucky_

 

 

 

Coming home is nice.  You ride back on the train with some of the other guys, the ones with familiar accents, who live on familiar streets.  Maybe you’ve seen them before, you don’t know. It could be that you crossed paths in some pub or other, or it could be that they’re familiar now from time spent in training and your brain is playing tricks on you.

You ride a few stops farther down the line, after they’ve gotten off, sitting in the rattling box with your ankles crossed and your bag on your lap, just listening, just feeling how it sways and twists around you, like an animal that you’re half-afraid will buck you off, even though you’re safe inside. You haven’t been on trains much. Never had the money, really.

Once, though.  Once, with a good paycheck, and the money Steve had gotten for selling some drawings, the two of you took the train to the beach.  Just to say that you’d done it, once.  You bought a ridiculous straw hat just to make Steve laugh, and then gave it to your sisters, after you got back.  They laughed too.  Maybe one of them still has it, shoved away in a closet somewhere.

When you get back to the apartment, Steve isn’t there.

 

 

 

Not every person can find the pivot point in their life, the exact day, the exact minute that everything changed, the moment the rest of the future moved around, like a hand on a clock or the axle on a car. The final pull of a trigger.

Yours is a fall day, the first day of school, a new school.  Yours is ten years old, with one scabbed knee hidden under your trousers, hair carefully combed by your mother before you left. Yours is hearing laughter around the corner as you’re walking home and going to look, just curious at first. Yours is seeing a skinny boy struggling to stand, to fight, to push back against a world determined to knock him down. Yours is coming at the biggest bully from behind with your hands turned to claws.

Yours is holding out those same hands to help the boy up.

 

 

 

In a way, shipping out is a relief. It’s not that anything changes, not in any big, meaningful way, in those last weeks before _everything_ changes.  But it’s the right thing to do, and Steve hates that he can’t do it, and your _having_ done it erects an invisible wall between you.  Steve is scattered, distracted.  He sees things but doesn’t see them.  Goes to the theater more often.  Forgets about dinner while it’s simmering on the stove.

When you leave, he’s going to burn the whole fucking block down.

You’d shake him if you thought it’d make any difference.  It would take more than you have to get all that through his skull.  _You can’t come.  Stop trying.  They won’t let you, and God damn it, they_ shouldn’t _let you. Basic would kill you, and if they let you through somehow, you’d get shot in a day.  An hour.  Stay here.  Stop trying. Please._

You’re not dumb enough to say it.  Not when Steve finally drifts home that night, looking almost off his head, except that you know he hasn’t been drinking.  You don’t say it because he won’t listen anyway. And because he’s _home_ , he’s _here_ , where you can keep an eye on him and lay awake in the cold hours towards the dawn, hearing him pace restlessly, back and forth, until he has to stop and sit on his bed with a creak, wheezing.

He’s _safe_.  Nobody in their right mind would take him. You tell yourself this all the way to the pub, focusing hard on the girls, on smiling and laughing, on remembering Steve’s last hug instead of the way he stayed in the registration booth.

“Your friend, he’s…” one of them says later, just a bit tipsy. Her friend looks at her and it’s one of those _looks_ , the ones you’ve seen too many times before, pushed around the table after Steve leaves, handed from one person to another.

“He’s _what?_ ” you say, a bit sharper than you meant to.

“Nothing,” she says, reflexive, and giggles a little.  It’s defensive.  A defensive laugh.  Deflecting. “It’s just, well. _You_ know.”

You know that Steve is worth twenty of this girl.  You know that, suddenly, you wish he could be sitting at this table too, and that this never came up, and that maybe Steve would forget about the war for just a little bit.  If someone would see him for what he is.  He wants a girl, you _know_ he does, and he deserves what he wants, he deserves to be happy, he deserves everything, and you have some vague half-formed notion that if you help him find _her_ , this hypothetical woman, then it will make up for all the times you—

“Steve’s my best friend, all right?” you snap.  “So lay off.”  They stare at you, and you can see them carefully decide to edge around this sore subject, to pretend it didn’t happen.  They’re deciding that you’ve had a bit too much.  You fix your smile back in place and try to pretend too, but your face feels bright and hard, like armor, like spines slowly growing longer and sharper.

Shipping out is a relief.

 

 

 

_Dear Steve, We’re so wet I think I’m going to drown.  I know your mom never let you out in wet clothes, afraid you’d catch your death of cold, so you probably don’t understand what I mean when I say it’s like wearing somebody else’s cast-off skin, the clothes I mean._

No. Too morbid.  Accurate, but morbid.

_Dear Steve, I won a pack of cigarettes in a poker game in the mess hall.  They’re not so big on keeping on top of us at all times here like they were at basic.  Nobody can bluff like you, though.  You’d have cleaned us all out._

No.  That would just make him wish he could be here too.

_Dear Steve._

_Dear Steve._

_Dear Steve._

 

 

 

_Stevie,_

_I killed people today._

_Stupid, isn’t it?  That’s what war is. Killing people. You’d think we’d all know that by now. I guess we just forgot. Somebody’s praying in the corner now.  I think I have a rosary somewhere in my bags, but I just don’t feel like crawling to God right now, asking for forgiveness._

_The noise, Steve.  We were all crazy.  Shells exploding, guns going off.  It was just a little skirmish and don’t worry, I’m all right.  I keep thinking that it should’ve been harder.  I’ve been telling myself that it was harder, even though it wasn’t.  We’re all just sacks of meat and blood, aren’t we?  You cut out the operator and suddenly the sack won’t move anymore._

_I’m scared, Stevie.  I was scared at the time and I’m scared now, but now I’m scared too about how easy it was to kill people.  Maybe they were guys just like me.  Maybe they had families waiting for them at home too, and now they’ll never see them again, all because of me.  But if I didn’t shoot them first, they’d have shot me, and then I’d never see you again. And I’m the better shot._

_You don’t wanna be over here, Stevie, really, you don’t.  I know you think you want to but you don’t. Don’t do that to me. If you care about me at all, don’t make me read a letter saying you’ve been killed, because it would kill me too. I’m serious, Steve. It’s different, saying it here, because I know I’ll never send this, but I don’t see the point of keeping on if you’re not there with me._

_I miss you.  I’m thinking now about the apartment.  You know, it’s small and drafty and the oven doesn’t really work, but it’s better than this tent here in the rain.  And you’re in it.  I’m pretending that I can lay down on the couch and hear you banging around in the kitchen, trying to cook something.  I’ll have to come fix it for you in a minute, but that’s okay, I’m okay with that. I was never upset about your cooking, Stevie.  Really. You’ll think I’m lying, but I’m not.  I want to eat your terrible cooking for the rest of my life._

You shove the pen aside, fold up the piece of paper in hard jerks, and then tear it up into strips, then squares, then tinier and tinier pieces, so small that the words disappear in snow.  Until you can scrape the pile into your palm and scatter it outside, in the middle of the night, the rain turning the bits into pulp.

Then you go back inside and stare at the roof of the tent until morning.

 

 

 

You know it’s bad when you start seeing Steve everywhere—not Steve, exactly, but pieces of him.  A gesture here, someone scraping their hair across their forehead. A laugh there. Hands.  A light tread across wooden floorboards in a shredded house.  Blue eyes, any blue eyes. The line of somebody’s shoulders.

There’s one man in particular who combines a few of these pieces. The hands and the hair, mostly. He’s taller than Steve and broader, but your brain is so starved for Steve that it doesn’t seem to care. You’re in the mess when the familiar hits you, dropped like a stone from above, and only fear keeps you away. Like a moth drawn to flame—an imitation flame, even, and if that isn’t pathetic, you don’t know what is.

_Dear Steve, Sometimes I see someone move his arm and I think it’s you and my heart just jumps, for a minute I’m so excited, but it never is you.  I’m telling myself that I’m glad it never is you, but I’m lying, I think._

Two weeks before Azzano, you run up against some actual Nazis in the woods, all of you shit-scared and covered in muck.  There are no good angles and no safe hides.  The man next to you gets his brains splattered all over the trees.  Operator gone. Meat-sack falling.

You take his extra magazines.  No sense in wasting them.

And it’s like that autumn day so many years ago, except more, except less, with the Steve-mimic and a German soldier, both of them resorting to fists and metal blows, what’s left when you have no bullets left and your knife lies in the loam three feet away.  The Steve-mimic on his back, choking, fighting to breathe around the arm at his throat, and the German on his knees, choking, fighting to breathe around your knife in the center of his back.  You jerk it out and cut his throat, just to be sure, all of you cold and hard.

You push him aside and drag your arm across your forehead. Blood everywhere, already sticky and congealing.  The Steve-mimic stares at you.  His eyes are brown, not blue, but your brain still jangles _steve steve steve_.  Stuck on the scratch in a record.

“Thanks,” the Steve-mimic says.  He picks himself up.  Flat, Midwestern accent.  Ohio, maybe. “I’m—thanks.”

“Don’t thank me yet,” you say.  “We need to get back to the line first.”  You don’t know what to do with your knife.  Eventually, you just shove it back into your belt.

“Back to the line,” he echoes.  “Yeah.”  He dredges up a smile from somewhere ( _steve steve steve_ ) and holds out his hand.  “Cole Simmons.”

“Bucky Barnes.”  He doesn’t seem to mind that your hand is covered in blood.  That all of you is covered in blood and slightly off-kilter. That your body hums and vibrates around a heart rotten with desperation.

But then, he doesn’t know that he only reminds you of your best friend, and that there are a lot of reasons why you can’t look away.

_Dear Steve, Sometimes I think that I’m going crazy.  I’m losing it, buddy. They’ll put me away and you’ll have to visit on the weekends.  You will come, won’t you?  You won’t forget about me?  I won’t forget about you.  I could never forget about you._

 

 

 

Maybe it’s inevitable, that somebody will eventually catch you out.  Especially now, with the rain and the mud, especially with the war, especially with how you’re realizing that war does not suit you, even if you suit it.  You are brittle.  You’re a block of wood under your father’s axe, positioned just so, and the blow comes and splits you apart.

You and Simmons never really speak.  It’s not like that.  You’ve crossed paths more than once in the intervening week and a half, in the mess, outside on the way from one tent to the other, in the thousand small places you run into people you fight with.

Today, in a brief break from the rain, you’re practicing with the gun. You don’t need it, not really, but it’s somehow calming, and it gives your brain something to do besides compose letters to Steve.  Brooding, your mother used to say, isn’t a healthy pastime.  And you’ve been indulging too much lately.

You know when Simmons wanders over to watch, his hands in his pockets. You’re a live wire. Weirdly, it only helps your concentration, the prickle along your spine, the sparks caught between your fingers.

“You’re scary, you know that?” Simmons says when you run out of rounds. “Anybody ever tell you?”

You snort.  Sling the gun over your shoulder.  Yeah, people have said that.  After a few months, the bullies learned to avoid Steve, if they thought you might be anywhere nearby.  _Stay away from Barnes.  He’s crazy.  He might kill you._   “Only once or twice.”

“New York?”

“Brooklyn.”

“I’ve always wanted to live in a city,” Simmons says wistfully. “We’re farmers. My family’s had the land for two generations, now, and my folks don’t seem keen on moving now.”

“It’s not as great as all that,” you say, indifferent.  It’s all you’ve known: familiar streets, familiar pubs, familiar drunks, familiar poverty, familiar menial jobs. It’s crowds and heat and smoke. It’s Steve, though, the city. That’s really why you stay.

You go to put the gun back, make a note of the cartridges you’ve used. Simmons follows you. The drizzle stages a revival and mists across your shoulders, settles in your hair.  You can just picture the way it would sit on Steve’s shoulders, on Steve’s hair, and it’s easy to extrapolate to Simmons’s shoulders and Simmons’s hair.  You drop the gun on the table with a clatter.

“Hey, Barnes,” he says, something in his voice, and you turn, to say what you don’t know, and he’s kissing you, pushing you back against the wooden wall, one of the few permanent buildings in this tent city, and your head bangs against it, your brain shorts out.

It takes you a moment too long to shove him away.  “What are you _doing?_ ”

“I’m not stupid, Barnes,” he says.  “Or blind.”  He’s still standing too close, wearing Steve’s shoulders and Steve’s hair, or close enough to them in the dim half-light of the shed.  “You can’t stop staring.  At first I thought I was imagining things, but I don’t think so.” He shrugs and looks at your lips. “And we’re here, so I figured…”

_So I figured, what the hell, might as well._

“It’s not like that,” you say, cold as a fucking glacier, and put your palm against his chest, just, you tell yourself, to push him off, to make him keep his distance.  An excuse. Some truth.  Anything, to convince him he’s wrong. “You just—remind me of my friend, back home.  Back off.”

“A friend, hmm,” he says, not like he believes you, like he thinks you really are mooning over him, like he thinks that if you had your way, _friend_ would be a euphemism.  Like he knows the truth.  He doesn’t bother saying anything else, and he doesn’t back off. He kisses you again.

He’s damp and musty, just like you, just like everything else in this damn army, and his stubble scrapes against your cheek and he’s pushy, and he’s the best thing you’ve ever tasted.  _Jesus.  You stupid, sorry, fuckheaded son of a bitch._

You knot your fingers in his Steve-blond hair and haul him closer, bodily, probably close enough to tear and hurt, but he comes well enough, only hissing slightly in discomfort, and presses up against you.  He’s hard against your thigh and it only makes you whine, just the smallest sound in your throat, and you burn, in shame and lust, caught between the two, tearing, agonized.  You’re kissing a man and you can’t even see him through Steve.

He grinds up against you, clumsy and sticky, but that’s okay, that’s _fine_ , that’s your fingernails scraping his skull when he wrenches away enough to bite at where your neck meets your shoulder, pulling at your shirt, his other palm hot over the small of your back.  You squeeze your eyes shut hard enough to see sparks and try not to pant, try to keep your footing, to push back, to hook one of your ankles behind his and drag him closer and closer still.  He moans roughly into your collarbone, hips jerking, and he’s not going to last long, after this long without getting laid.  That’s probably the only reason he’s here with you.

Not that knowing this, in some distant part of your mind, makes any difference to the rest of you.  The operator has clocked out and the meat-sack burns and _lives._ It’s wild, a rabid dog let off the chain.  It’s every time your heart snagged when you looked at Steve, it’s every time you woke up from hot dreams, it’s every time you caught yourself wondering about what he’d like, it’s every time you played the gentleman to get away from a girl’s eager hands.

You twist and put his shoulders against the wall instead.  He’s startled, a little; you distract him neatly, nicely, by dipping your hand past the waistband of his trousers.  He groans and lets his head fall back, thrusts into your palm.  You grip tight and stop him from ending things too soon.

“Hold on,” you say, blurting it out on the crest of a breath, and he probably doesn’t really hear or understand you, from the way he blinks, confused, and you kiss him again ( _steve steve steve_ ). He’s all right with that part, and he’s more than all right with the part where you fall to your knees, a puppet with cut strings, and press your face into his stomach, yanking gracelessly at the catch of his pants.  It occurs to him to help, after a few seconds of this, and it’s much easier than it should be, probably, to suck his hard cock into your mouth.

With your eyes closed, like this, the damp soaking into your knees, one hand braced against the wall and the other hooked around his hip, it’s so, so easy to pretend that he really is Steve.  Steve’s groan in Steve’s chest, Steve’s sharp hip under your palm, Steve’s hands in your hair, Steve’s cock in your mouth. Imagination.  You’ve always had a vivid imagination.

When he comes in your mouth, it’s Steve’s seed on your tongue, and it’s Steve’s face you picture when you squeeze your own cock, just that side of painful.

Afterwards, he’s unsteadier than you are.  You leave him to sort himself out, put the gun back on the rack, fill out the proper forms and leave them on the clipboard.

“I won’t tell anyone,” he says finally.

“You’re not that stupid,” you tell him, brittle and cold, and leave first, tired to your bones, and hating that you can’t even bring yourself to regret it.

As punishment, two days later you march to Azzano.

 

 

 

You’re fifteen the winter Steve nearly dies. Pneumonia.  Settled in his chest, seizing his lungs in its cold, bony hands, squeezing tight.  You’re only allowed to see him once.  Everyone thinks it’s the last time; your mother pulls you away with an iron grip on your shoulder.  You still look back, still strain to see Steve, white as flour, wrapped up in so many blankets that you can only see his face.

That night, the rattling in his chest is in your skull, like bones clattering together.

You go to church—something you usually fight, tooth and nail, bored silly, though you try to hide it so Mom won’t see, and not sure, really, what all this has to do with _something greater_. But perhaps, if you’ve understood things right, if Sister Alleline has drummed anything into you, anything at all, then this may be the place to find a miracle.

That morning, dirty and sleepless and your coat thin and worn around you, with no money to buy a better one, you kneel at one of the pews for hours, until you can’t feel your legs.  It’s so cold.  You’ll take the cold, if it means Steve won’t feel it anymore.  Anything.

_Let him live._   Please.  _Take me instead._ You can handle it. _Just let him live.  I’ll do anything.  Let me take it all._ A trade.  _I’m stronger than he is.  Give him my strength, I don’t care, just let him live._

God lets him live.  It just takes Him a while to collect on your end of the bargain.

 

 

 

_Dear Steve, I’m sorry, but I won’t be coming home.  I know I said I would.  I guess I lied.  I wanted to, I tried my best.  It just wasn’t meant to be._

The not-quite-Nazis will kill you.  You have no illusions about this.  They’re stingy with food and liberal with beatings, and your cages aren’t heated.  You wake up sometimes to a pair of dead, staring eyes, stuck in the head of someone who lost the war in the middle of the night.

During the day, you work.

On what, you have no idea.  Metal, gears.  Giant, though. Some of them are taller than you are. Most are powered by a strange blue light.  You find yourself taking notes, almost, like you’re gathering intelligence before your inevitable escape.  But what escape? There is only the hunger, and the winter, and the work.

They’ve captured other men, too, from other units.  There’s quite a mass in the cages.  A British man, with a red beret, which he carefully keeps as clean as he can, hiding it in his pocket when you’re at the assembly line. He sees you looking at this ritual, once, and smiles a little.  “Sorry. Old habits are hard to break.”

“I’m just surprised they let you keep it.”  You shove a part into place, stinging your fingers. The blue energy crackles if you’re not careful.

“Hard to attack anyone with a hat,” he says.  He tightens the bolts, while you hold it steady, and when it moves on, to be replaced by another just like it, he says, “Falsworth. Friends call me Monty.”

“Barnes,” you reply.  “Friends call me Bucky.”

It’s the one thing HYDRA can’t suppress.  Men speak to each other through the bars—pass food, occasionally, if you can do without some that day.  Sometimes, that’s because you happened to be on a lighter duty that day.  Mostly, it’s because you know you’re dying and someone else needs it more.

Self-sacrifice. Steve would love these guys.

_Dear Steve, Sometimes I still see you, but mostly that’s just me wishing.  I’ll never see you again, will I?_

You put your head between your knees and fight to breathe. Swallow your screams and your sobs.  Swallow again. Clench your hands tight in your hair. What a joke.  What a fucking joke.  Falling apart like this.  Steve would fight them to his last breath, you know this like you know your own name.  They knock you down, you get back up.  Once you start running, they’ll never let you stop.

_Okay,_ you think, and just like that, you’re calm again, like you’re at the firing range, your heart slowing to steady your hands.  You can do that. Not start running. You’ve spent too many years hanging around Steve, soaking him up, to not have a bit of fight in you, buried deep. You’ll fight, and fight, and fight, until they put you down.

At the assembly line, the man next to you fumbles the power unit, his hands shaking with exhaustion and fear, and it drops to the floor. This particular case is a little faulty, and it breaks with a pop.

A masked guard is there almost instantly, raising a baton. He cracks your workmate across the shoulders and goes to try again.

You get in the way, managing to catch the blow against your palms. “ _Stop,_ ” you snap.  “He gets it, all right?  If you would raise the fucking heat in here we wouldn’t even have a problem.”

The guard stares at you.  The man on the floor stares at you.  Everyone stares at you.  You glare into the goggles and silently dare him to swing.  And he does, but not with the baton, backhanding your cheek, knocking you staggering into the line, still creaking onwards, the gears unfinished.  You spit out a bit of blood—you cut your cheek on your teeth—and look back up at him. Straighten up.

This time, you earn the baton, and the instant you’re on the hard floor, he sheathes it and walks away, _tmp tmp tmp_ the boots on the floor, the distant thud of furnaces.  You wheeze until you can get your breath again; stand up, and help the man to his feet.

His hands tighten on your forearms.  “You shouldn’t have done that,” he whispers, in accented English.

“I don’t like bullies,” you say.

They have to winch the line back.  Everyone gets less food that day.

 

 

 

It’s hostility, it’s burning anger, it’s pushing back, it’s taking longer to put something in place because you can, it’s doing everything faster and looking bored later, it’s keeping your back straight, it’s keeping your head high, it’s meeting hidden eyes, it’s always, always, always getting back up.

It’s why the guards take you away from the cages one night, digging in your heels, hands clenched into fists, and it’s why, ironically, they don’t hit you or hurt you or try to knock you out, even for five minutes of peace.

It’s why the frog-faced scientist takes an interest in you in the first place.

“Strap him down,” he tells them, his eyes bright behind his round glasses, and you want to hit, snap, claw, anything to get free.  But the guards are stronger—they’ve been fed properly for the past month—and there are more of them.

You bite one, though you only get the taste of leather on your tongue for your trouble, and someone has to gag you, forcing a tough strip between your teeth.  And then you’re down, restrained, your wrists and shoulders and ankles forced flat.

You’re furious and you’re afraid.

“You’re a fighter,” the doctor says, almost kindly.  “Perhaps that is just what we need, yes? A fighter.”

Soon, you’re fighting to bite back your screams.

 

 

 

You’re in the lab, trying not to cry, not succeeding terribly well, and Steve comes in.  He’s anxious.  He touches your face with his cold fingers.  Bucky? he says.  Bucky?

“Steve, why are you here,” you say, with what breath you have left.

Bucky? he says.  Bucky? His eyes fix wide on your face and he keeps his fingers on your forehead.

 

You’re in the lab, almost asleep, and Steve comes in. The world bleeds around him and he stands in eternal summer.  For some reason, he has a catcher’s mitt hooked loosely around one thin hand. Bucky, you gotta get up, he says. We’ll lose if you don’t take shortstop.

_Did you bring the bat with you?_ you want to ask.  The drugs are sucking you down and your body is lead.  You can’t move your lips.

Aw, Buck, Steve says.  His eyes are sad.  Can’t you come? Just for five minutes?

_Love to, I’d love to, just give me a bat and I’ll be there, just let me smash this man’s skull first, please, find me a bat—_

 

You’re in the lab, the doctor muttering in the corner, his words walking along your eyeballs on prickle-feet, and Steve comes in. He’s as you last saw him, hundreds of years ago, in that too-big coat, his hair falling limp across his forehead.  He flattens it nervously with his palm.

He doesn’t say anything.  He just looks at you and fidgets.  Like he’s waiting for something.  The doctor mutters and mutters and you can’t concentrate, you’re convinced Steve has said something, that you’ve missed it, and every time your heart lurches, because this will be the last time you ever hear Steve’s voice and you’ll never forgive yourself if you miss it.  But he never says anything.

 

You’re in the lab, your skin too tight, you’re afraid that you might split at the seams and spill everywhere, the meat-sack shrinking too far, and Steve comes in.  He looks nice.  He’s wearing a suit that neither of you could actually afford, a tailored blue waistcoat and perfect crisp white shirt.  The tie sits loose around his neck, deliberately not pulled quite to.

Hey, Bucky, he says.  He smiles a little, a small, sad quirk of his lips.  You’ve taken a leaf out of my book, huh?  It’s not fair to die on me.  He lays his palm on your forehead, slides it down your face.  His other hand grips your arm.  Where he touches, your skin loosens, elastic again, warming, a golden flush from the tips of his fingers. I’ve been waiting for you, Buck. You can’t leave me now.

You close your eyes, but somehow you can still almost see him, a strength in your blood, and he leans close.

Don’t start running, he says.  They’ll never let you stop.  And when he kisses you, your whole body shines.

 

You’re in the lab, exhausted again, the light long gone, staring at the ceiling, whispering to yourself, some nonsense to ground you in your self, and Steve comes in.  He’s dark and has a helmet on his head.  The jacket he’s wearing makes him look taller and broader.

He’s saying something.  You’ll miss it.  It’s so hard to focus. You can hear thudding in your ears and somehow he’s gotten the straps off, his hands on you, yanking you upright, and you’re dizzy and surprised, because his hands are warm and his eyes are Steve’s and he’s—he’s—

“I thought you were dead,” Steve says.

“I thought you were… smaller,” you say, blinking, befuddled, held upright by his large, strong hands, and it takes everything you have not to fall into his maybe-real, definitely-muscled arms.

 

 

 

There’s a forest, now, dark and damp and mercifully not on fire, and there’s Steve, a little singed, a little worse for wear, but also mercifully not on fire, and you remember your hands like iron on his wrists, probably not really helping him pull himself over the railing to you, and you remember having to force your own fingers open, because you had found him and nearly lost him.

You prop yourself up against a tree, now, to forestall the inevitable collapse, jamming your elbow hard into the wood.  You’ve lost most of a sleeve, somehow, but the realness of the bark hurts, and it’s lovely, and you don’t want to move your arm for anything. The tree is real. The escape is real. _Steve_ is real.

Probably.

“Are you sure you don’t want to sit down?” someone asks.  You force your eyes to focus.  It’s the Englishman with the beret. Monty?  “You look about to pass out.”

“I’m fine,” you lie.  “We have to get moving here in a minute, I’m—”

“Bucky,” Steve says, coming out of nowhere, somehow nearly silent in his new body. “What the hell are you doing? Sit down.  If you fall and hit your head and die I _will_ kill you.”

“Jesus, Steve, I’m not that helpless,” you snap.

He just looks at you, his eyes still Steve’s, his face still Steve’s, and you’re suddenly exhausted.  You let him help you down and you drop your head back against the tree. He leaves his hand on your shoulder.

“See if you can find anyone with medical experience,” he tells someone, probably Monty.  “We need to do triage. Find the men in the worst shape and put them on the truck or the tank.  We don’t have a lot of room.”

“Captain,” Monty says.  You hear him walk away.

“I don’t need to go on the fucking truck,” you say.  You close your eyes.  It doesn’t make Steve’s hand on your shoulder any better. Any more real. It’s a dream, it has to be, you’ve finally gone mad, you’ve lost it in Zola’s lab.  This is a delusion created by a dying brain.

“Of course not,” Steve says.  “You’re walking the rest of the way right next to me.”  He’s so familiar.  He even smells a bit like Steve, under the smoke and sweat.

It’s suddenly too much.  You flinch away, a half-aborted movement, and press the heels of your hands into your eyes, digging hard enough to see stars.  You catch the hitch in your chest and try to force it back down.

“Hey, hey, Bucky,” he says.  He pries you from the tree and hugs you instead, big and strong and warm, your Steve turned inside out, _you_ turned inside out, shuddering into his shoulder.  Your tears soak his jacket and he doesn’t say anything about it.  He just keeps you from shaking apart. One palm is hot on your lower back, the other cradling the back of your skull.  “It’s okay,” he says.  “It’s gonna be okay, Buck, I promise.”

You laugh a little.  It’s dragged out of you one huff at a time.  “Jesus Christ, Steve,” you say.  “You gained two hundred pounds in two minutes.  _It is never gonna be okay again_.”

“C’mon,” Steve says, pretending to be upset.  “You don’t like it, not even a little bit?”

He’s _Steve._   Of course you like it.  You’re just used to the old version, is all.  You know you’ll adjust ( _steve steve steve_ ).

That’s when the little operator seems to accept that this Steve is a real Steve. It presses some buttons. The meat-sack calms.

“Well, you probably won’t be dying of pneumonia any time soon,” you say into his jacket.  “That’s a plus.”

He laughs—and it’s Steve’s laugh, still, even in a bigger chest—and squeezes you close for a breathless minute.  “God, I missed you,” he says.

“You’re gonna crush me, you punk,” you say, playing up a wheeze. Instead of _me too._   Instead of _I love you._

He lets go and grins at you, bright and sooty and dirt-smudged and happy. You still want to yank him back and kiss him.  You’re addled. You’ve forgotten how to handle the real Steve.  Maybe he doesn’t even notice your dazed expression, because he clearly doesn’t think twice before picking you up, getting you both to your feet again.  “All right?” he asks.

You know he’s talking about more than one thing.  “Yeah,” you say.

He goes back to check on Monty’s progress, and you watch him go, and think, with abrupt clarity: _I’m fucked._

 

 

 

The summer you’re thinking about, the summer you’re thirteen, is the greatest summer of your life.  You’re poor, but that’s nothing new. You’re going through the first of many awkward growth spurts, but you’ll survive.  You’re starting to do odd jobs around town, but that’s exciting.

There are probably lots of miserable days, lots of rainy days. Lots of days you can’t sleep or go to bed hungry.  Lots of days you fight with your sisters or your parents.  But it feels like that summer is made of light. It’s heat and dust and skies the color of Steve’s eyes.

You spend every spare minute with Steve, that summer, clattering up and down the stairs to his apartment so many times that you hear the exact sound of each step in your dreams.  One of Steve’s worst tormentors moves to a different part of town, that summer, and it seems like you walk the streets freely, like you don’t get in any bloody fights, even though you surely do.  You’re walking on air and your head is in the clouds.

On the last true day of summer, that afternoon before evening, you and Steve are on the fire escape.  He dangles his legs between the bars and you lie sprawled on your back with your head practically in his lap.  The metal is warm against your skin.

He’s telling you about a radio program, something you missed because you were helping out at the corner shop, and you don’t care about the storyline so much as that he’s telling it, and occasionally you laugh, not because it’s funny but because you’re happy.  The world, in that moment, is perfect.

He looks down at you and grins, pausing in his story to take a breath, probably breathless from talking so quickly, and your own breath catches, in tune with the hitch in your chest, the sun against his hair and the blue of his eyes.

“And the hero finally tells her that he loves her,” Steve says, wrapping up, happy too.  He looks across the courtyard at the next apartment building, swinging his feet absently. “I guess it’d be nice,” he says. He rests his forehead on the bars. “To have a girl. You know, eventually.”

It’s the first time girls have come up between you, and you hardly notice, too busy looking at him, especially when he can’t see you.  He’s staring at something else.  Curtains, maybe, or a missing shingle in the roof. He’ll probably use it as a detail in his sketches later.

“Mmm, I guess so,” you say, still lazy, still happy.  Still thinking that it’s a hypothetical, that it will remain a hypothetical, that it will be you two for the next ten years, twenty, however long forever is.  That last day of summer, forever is full of Steve, and you know you’ll never want anything but him.

The summer you’re thinking about is a long time ago.  It’s winter that takes its turn now.

 

 

 

You meet Monty’s friends through Monty, back at camp, while Steve’s been dragged off to meetings.  They’re shipping you all back to England, eventually, and in the meantime, you sit with them.  They’re in awe of Steve, a little, and all of this is hard to reconcile with the way people used to look at Steve, but you’re happy for this change, because this is what Steve has always deserved.

It doesn’t stop you from being just the tiniest bit jealous. _You_ saw Steve for what he is years and years and years ago, and it isn’t fair for everyone else to try to take Steve away now, when he’s over a foot taller and built like a tank.  You remind yourself that he didn’t single-handedly invade a HYDRA fortress for _everyone else_.

Just you.

“Your friend,” says Dum-Dum Dugan, the morning before you all get flown out, “is a lunatic.  I can see where you get it from.”

“Yeah, he rubbed off on me,” you say.  You’re lying down on a cot, sideways, with your feet on the ground so you can share with Jim Morita.  You’re not tired, or dizzy, or even aching.  Being near Steve has cured all your torture-induced pains. You just take a vicious pleasure in lying down without straps.  “Careful, you’ll be too dumb to walk away from a fight too, if you stick around.  He’s contagious.”

“Maybe it’s a good kind of contagious,” Monty says.  Gabe Jones and Jacques Dernier mutter to each other in French and then burst out laughing.

“He wants to know if those muscles are contagious,” Gabe says.

“My fist in your face is contagious, if you don’t shut up,” you say, and this makes them laugh again.

“I kind of want to go back, you know?” Morita says after it’s been quiet for a few minutes, all of you just listening to the rain, you leaning hard on the beat of your heart.

“What, to the cages?” Dum-Dum says, startled.

“No, dummy.  To those factories. How many other people do you think they have cooped up in cages like that?  It makes me mad,” Morita says.  He drums his fingertips on the canvas sling of the cot.

“Me too,” Gabe says.

They all agree.  It’s anger, in the tent.  It’s the fight, taking root in their stomachs, born in captivity and hatched when someone gave them the opportunity to take their freedom into their own hands.

“You’re contagious,” you tell Steve later, watching him pack up his own things. Most of yours got redistributed after Azzano, and the rest is probably in a warehouse somewhere, waiting to get sent in the post to the apartment where Steve no longer is. You’re very glad you never wrote any of those letters.

“I’m what?” he says.  He squints up at you.

“Contagious,” you repeat.  “You’ve turned those guys into idiots, just like you.  I swear, they need to put you in quarantine before you infect the entire army.”

“You realize,” he says, grinning, “that I have no idea what you’re talking about?”

“If you still want to take the fight to HYDRA, I think I’ve found you a team,” you say.

“Really?” he says, interested, sitting back on his heels.  His eyes burn on your face.

Someone clears her throat at the tent flap.  His attention flicks off you in an instant.  “Peggy!” he says.  He gets to his feet, a little clumsy, a little embarrassed. You stay seated, leaning back on your wrists on Steve’s cot.

“The plane leaves in thirty minutes,” she says, in her crisp accent, like and unlike Monty’s.  Her hair is damp and she’s wearing a bomber jacket.  “Stark wants to take you in his, and he’s irritated Colonel Philips into letting him.  Are you ready to go?”

“Nearly,” Steve says, remembering, and grabs a few more shirts to stuff into his duffle.  “Oh—Buck, where’re your things?  You coming?”

“Nah, I’m good,” you say.  You get up.  “I think they already packed it on one of the crew transports.  I’d better stick with it.”  You’re itchy, jittery.  You’re suddenly unsure of your footing and you’re safer with the others.  “See you in London, then?”  And you duck out before he can respond, pasting on a distracted smile for Agent Carter as you go past.

 

 

 

You remember, the second time, to take a stab at it, partly just because you don’t like the way Steve looks at Carter and Carter looks at Steve, and if you can find any way to get in between that, you will. But she sees through you, and she knows you’re just bullshitting.

You don’t like Carter.  The feeling’s probably mutual.

Steve doesn’t notice, of course, but Steve’s an idiot.  He’s an idiot in love with Carter’s swagger and red lipstick and ability to punch a man in the face.  And because he’s in love with her, he wants to believe that you, his best friend, like her well enough too, and so he’s talked himself into it. Somehow, he doesn’t notice that you both go out of your way to avoid each other.

For years, you’ve been telling yourself that if Steve found someone, you’ll be happy, because he deserves to find someone.  He deserves to be the hero in that radio drama he told you about all those summers ago.  You will concede the battle because you’re not part of it in the first place, and you will be happy to let him be happy, and you will attend their wedding, and you will visit on the weekends, and—

Oh, who are you kidding.  Now that Carter is realized, you want to break something.

It hurts.  You’d talked yourself out of knowing that it would hurt, and being in the same room—the same _building_ —as Steve and Carter is like deliberately setting yourself on fire.  You’re fully aware of how hateful this is, and how angry you get, but you can’t seem to make yourself _stop_.

Shipping out is a relief.  Steve has a picture of Carter in his goddamn compass, but Carter herself is elsewhere. Steve pines, but he forgets, usually, when there’s something to do.

And, slowly but surely, you end up in his focus again.

 

 

 

You’re not sure how you feel about Stark—who talks your ear off when he can, which is always—but he does give you all the best equipment money can buy.  Which is how you end up with a _real_ rifle, a thing of beauty with the perfect scope perched on top.  That’s your job, with the Howling Commandos.

You’re not sure who came up with that name, either.  They do all the howling.  You do the sitting quietly, blowing people’s heads off from afar.

Someone tells someone else who tells Steve, and he wants to see, when he’s still forming the team, and, reckless with Carter so close by, you show him, with every gun you can get your hands on, every firearm in Stark’s sizeable research collection.  You show him until your shoulder aches from the recoil and your trigger finger nearly seizes up.

“Jesus, Bucky,” he says, eyes wide.  He has a stack of targets in front of him, lined up with holes in the center. “When did you learn how to do this?”

You shrug and touch the barrel of the rifle that will eventually be yours, just with the tips of your fingers.  “I didn’t, really,” you say.  “They just found out I could, at Basic.  That’s why I got promoted.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Steve demands.  He sounds hurt.

You shrug again, still looking fixedly down.  You can’t meet his eyes.  Your hands are smeared with gunpowder, even if you can’t see most of it, and it feels like you’ll get it on him if you’re not careful. “You were pretty distracted after I came back,” you say.

“Yeah, but you’re _really good,_ ” Steve says.  “It’s just—you’re talented, Buck, I mean, you’re talented at a lot of things, but I would have been… proud of you.”

“Yeah, I’m talented,” you snap, angry enough to look up, then, to see that he’s stepped away from the targets to lean with his hip against the table, the table covered in blunt instruments of death.  “I’m talented at two things, Steve.  Keeping you alive and killing everyone else. That’s not—something to be proud of.”

Steve looks at you for a minute, just looks, long enough that your nerves wind up tighter and tighter and you start to worry that you’ve said too much, that he’s heard too much.  But he just says, “Right now, Buck, keeping me alive _is_ killing everyone else.”

“Because you’re stupid enough to think you can take on HYDRA _by yourself._ ”

“But I’m not by myself,” he says.  “I have you.  And you’ll have eyes on my six, just like you always do.”

All of your organs turn over at once.  Because you _will_ kill for him.  You can, and you will, and you always will.  Because _everyone else_ is well worth sacrificing to protect him.  And it’s stupid to pretend otherwise.

“You’re damn right I will,” you say.  “I can’t trust you to look after yourself.  Tell Stark I want that one, then.  With the best scope he can find.”

And Steve grins and drags you out of the room with one arm slung across your shoulders.

 

 

 

So Steve looks dashing in his uniform, and Dernier blows shit up, and Monty builds up an extensive list of contacts, and Dum-Dum and Gabe and Morita are the cavalry, and you sit on a hill or on a roof and shoot anyone Steve doesn’t notice.  It’s a good system.  Anyway, nobody manages to die.

It’s such a good system that Senator What’s-His-Name, the one who had Steve prancing around in tights in the first place, decides to put the rest of you in those awful Captain America comics too.  Morita, for one, is delighted when he finds out.

“We’re going to be famous!” he says.  “I’m going to mail a copy back to my parents.  My mom’ll get such a kick out of it.”

“I want to punch Hitler too,” Dum-Dum says, lazy, his feet kicked up on a rock by the fire.  You’re in Italy, again, this time following a HYDRA supply train back to their base. “Write to the comic people and tell them that, Cap.”

Steve just looks embarrassed.  “I’m not sure they’d…”

“Steve, it’s _you_ ,” you say. You’re playing cards with Gabe over his folded bedroll.  They stick to your fingers, in this damp air.  You hate Italy.  “They’ll give you anything you want.”

“Just because _you’re_ a pushover,” Gabe says.  “Three spades. Beat that, Barnes.”

“Four hearts,” you say carelessly, dropping them on the mat. “You owe me two cigarettes.”

“Come on!  You have cards up your sleeves or something.”

“Maybe I’m just lucky,” you say.  Lucky that everyone is distracted enough by Gabe’s grumbling that they don’t notice how your hands shake and your palms sweat.  Lucky that Steve doesn’t think about you being _a pushover_.

Sometimes it’s hard to be grateful for luck.

Three weeks later, the safe route for HYDRA caravans no longer safe, and the base at the end a smoking crater, you’re back in London.  Resupplying, that’s what it’s supposed to be. In four days you’re all packing your bags and going back across the Channel.

Four days is too long.  That’s four days of Steve and Carter mincing around each other, tentatively making up from some fight you hadn’t known they’d had; four days of pub-hopping for beers that don’t work like they used to, you feel so damn sober these days. It’s still war, it still doesn’t suit you, and you sit in your room for hours the first morning back, fingers clenched in your hair, fighting to take deep breaths.

_Dear Steve, I’m sorry I’ve been acting so strange lately.  I just don’t know how to act around you anymore.  You pulled me off that table and some part of me still thinks it’s a dream, and parts of it are horrible, I hate it, but I don’t want to wake up while you’re still here.  And that’s just the sick sort of thing Zola would do, if he could.  Anything to make me stop fighting._

_Dear Steve, Do you ever think about after the war?  I suppose you must, with Carter and all. What do you see when you picture it?  All I can see is the war. I don’t think there will be an ‘after,’ not for me.  I try to imagine where I’ll be in five years but all I see are tall, endless trees, and we’re slogging through to get somewhere, but somewhere is nowhere, and I’m on the opposite side of the line from you and it doesn’t matter anyway._

You write it all out in your head, line after endless, looping line, then lock the words up in a box and shove it away to gather dust.  You dry your face, fix your hair, and go to find the others.  To find Steve, really.  To remind yourself of the lines of his face.

They’re at a table in some spare room at headquarters, laughing so hard that Dum-Dum nearly cries.  He wipes at his big red face and laughs and laughs and doubles over, trying to breathe, wheezing like he’s cracked a rib.  The others are no better, really—he’s just the worst off.

“Bucky!” Monty says, and cracks up again, which sets Dernier off, for some reason, and they’re giggling like schoolgirls.

Steve’s not there, because this is real life, after all, and he’s probably off with Carter somewhere.  “Why are you laughing?” you say, annoyed.  Your head hurts and you want to go back to your real bed.

Dum-Dum almost falls over and Gabe has to prop him up.  Morita lifts his face from the table, where it’s been pressed against what, on further examination, seems to be a comic book. He takes one look at you and—this is getting old.  Whatever this is.

“ _What?_ ”

“Just—oh god,” Morita says, and puts his face in his hands, his shoulders shaking. “Just take a look. I’m sorry, Barnes, it’s just—”

Exasperated, you stomp over and snatch up the comic, flipping through the pages. There’s a big man you think is probably supposed to be Dum-Dum, and exaggerated caricatures of Dernier and Monty, and for some reason there’s a kid tagging along too.  A kid with—your name.  Frantic, you try to find the _actual_ you, because this has to be a joke, and come up empty-handed.

“Why the fuck am I _thirteen years old?_ ”

And that just sets them off again, of course, because your life is unending pain and misery, and your friends only find it amusing that a propaganda comic has cast you about twelve years too young.  And stuffed you in the most awful getup you’ve ever seen in your life.

“Jesus Christ,” you say.  “This is just—”

“You get kidnapped in the next one,” Morita says, grabbing it from Gabe’s hands, tossing it on the table.  “And then we rescue you.”

“You’re kidding,” you say flatly.

Morita isn’t kidding.

“What’s going on?” Steve says from the doorway forty-five minutes later, sounding very confused.  You can imagine the look on his face but you refuse to move your head from the cradle of your arms. Your face burns. “Are you guys drunk?”

“We are reading about ourselves,” Monty says.  “We’ve taken three turns each, if you’d like one?”

“The comics came in?”  Steve’s closer now.  You can hear his footfalls now if you listen for them.

“They got the bowler hat right,” Dum-Dum says, the first really coherent thing he’s managed since you walked in.  “And Falsworth thinks he’s terribly dashing, all things considered.”

The moment Steve sees what the comics have done, he says, “Oh, Bucky.”

“Shut up,” you say into the table.  “I’m composing angry letters.  Unless you’re volunteering to contribute stamps, just shut up.”

Steve sits down next to you, amid renewed bursts of laughter, and slings an arm around your shoulders like you used to do to him, when he needed cheering up.  It tears in your chest. “Well, if Schmidt gets his hands on some of these, he won’t be looking for that bullet to the forehead,” he says. He moves his hand to your hair, ruffles it up beyond repair, after all that work you did before you came down, and you try to shove him away, and he pushes back, and you end up grappling for a minute until he gets a hand free and flicks you on the nose.

“I take it back, you’re both thirteen years old,” Dum-Dum says. He sounds like he can breathe again.

“Seriously, Buck, that outfit is something else,” Steve says.  He smiles at you, inviting you to see the humor in the situation.  Maybe it’s a little bit appropriate that they cast you at thirteen years old.

“I am still writing to them,” you say, grabbing one of the comics from Dernier to remind yourself of your resolve.  “This is ridiculous.  I’m the handsomest of all you bastards, and they’ve turned me into a _kid_.”

“Hey, watch it, Barnes,” Morita says.  He puffs out his chest.  “The ladies love them some of _this._ ” And he waggles his eyebrows for effect.

“Yeah,” you say, deadpan.  “I can see where they’re coming from.  You’re irresistible.”

“Keep dreamin’, pal,” he says.  “I’ve got my eye on one of the girls in the typing pool.  You know, the one with the red hair and the great legs?”

He goes on, but you don’t listen to the rest.  Steve is warm and solid at your side, smiling at whatever Morita is saying, your legs pressed together.  You stare fixedly down at some illustrator’s concept of you at thirteen.  You at twenty-six can hardly recognize him.

 

 

 

“You have an impressive record,” Colonel Philips says. “For a kid in shorts.”

He’s read the comics too.  You clench your jaw and look at the crease in the tent over his shoulder. “Yes, sir.”

“And your poker face is lousy,” he says.  “Luckily, I don’t need you to win money for me at cards, Sergeant Barnes.  I just need you to go down the countryside a ways for a day or two.  There’s a HYDRA informant that needs shooting.  Details are in the folder.”  He silences you with a look, before you can properly get your mouth open, your heart turning over, _no no you don’t understand I am not going anywhere not without Steve he’ll get killed without me_ —“I’ve already told Rogers that this is how it’s going to be.  They need some updated intelligence anyway.  No sense in running into an unknown situation.  Your truck leaves in two hours.  You’re dismissed, Sergeant.”

You want to push back, to fight it, but Steve would only end up in trouble, and if he’ll be here anyway, behind the lines, he’ll probably be safe enough. You pick up the folder. “Yes, sir,” you say, unable to keep the stiffness out of your voice, and walk out.

Steve’s in his tent, his head in his hands, his fingers tight in his hair. Your heart lurches. “Steve?”

His head jerks up.  “Bucky!” He smiles up at you, a bit sheepishly.  “Hey. I thought Philips would’ve sent you off already.”

You shrug.  You’re in your coat and you have your gun with you.  The small bag’s in the truck already.  “I have ten minutes.  I wanted to grab something to eat before I left.”

“Good,” he says quickly.  “That’s good.”  He gets up then. “We’re not going anywhere until you get back,” he says.  “Dernier and Monty have some ideas for new bombs.  They think it’s best to be prepared before we go into Germany, and I guess they need supplies anyway.  We can wait.”

“It’ll only be a couple of days,” you say.  “Well.  Probably more like three, with travel time.  I’ll be back before you know it.”

“Yeah, I know,” he says.  “You always come back.”  Still, though, he steps forward and hugs you, a quick movement, a single moment against his collarbone.  He’s not all that much taller than you, not really, after all; you’re not sure whether this is for him or you.

“You couldn’t beat me off with a stick,” you say, like you said to his mother years ago, and step back because if you don’t you might never be able to tear yourself away.  “Don’t do anything stupid before I get back.”

To you, it’s a promise.  A talisman.  You said that once and you did get back, eventually.

Steve grins.  “I’ll keep the stupid with me this time,” he says.  “We’ll hand it off to one of the guys.  Stay safe, Buck.”

You give him a mock salute and walk away, the ground not so wet now, but starting to harden with the first breath of winter over the trees.

 

 

 

_Dear Steve, Turns out that hanging around abandoned buildings is really cold. My hands are freezing. I begged some gloves off an old man at our last rest stop.  Otherwise my fingers would probably freeze off and where would we be then? At least Philips would stop sending me away.  Maybe I should take the gloves off, huh?_

_Dear Steve, I guess all those bullies at school were right. They were scared of me, do you remember?  I didn’t care, then.  I think they were a little afraid that I’d kill them if they really provoked me—if they pushed you around too much, I mean, and I caught them at it.  This is a bit like that.  It’s too easy to put these men down. I guess it seems like it should be hard, or I should feel guilty about so much blood on my hands, but I don’t.  Maybe I can turn it off.  The caring. You’d feel guilty, I know you would, and you’d hate it if I told you that I don’t.  You think I’m like you.  I’m nowhere near worthy of you, Steve. That’s the part that makes me sick.  Not blowing people’s brains out._

_Dear Steve, Do you remember the summers when we were younger? I’ve been thinking about them a lot.  Sometimes that’s the only thing that can warm me up.  It’s like lighting a fire inside.  I never told you, but I dreamed about you, in Zola’s lab. Once I dreamed that you came in and healed me.  It’s like that. I don’t even need the gloves._

_Dear Steve, I didn’t tell you everything about the dreams.  You can lie by omission, you know.  By that measure, I’ve been lying to you for as long as I’ve known you.  It eats away inside.  Stupid, isn’t it? We’re supposed to be perfectly honest with each other.  I’m a coward, I’m afraid that you would leave me if you knew.  I can’t stand that.  Better to lie, huh?  Besides, you have Carter now.  Seems stupid to mess everything up for nothing, not when it doesn’t matter, not really._

_Dear Steve, I lied.  It does matter.  I’m full of sin, Stevie, so full I might burst.  Do you want the list?  I’m greedy; all I want is more and more and more of you.  I could glut myself to death on you.  From the moment I met you, I’ve visited my wrath on the heads of any who’d even think of harming you, and I’m proud of it. I’m poison-green with envy of your Agent Carter, and I think she knows it, and I am too lazy, too stuck in the way things are, to tell you so.  And the lust, Stevie.  Lust eats at my resolve.  Sister Alleline would have a field day with my soul.  And isn’t that just like me?  To push the issues away and think about something else?  I make myself sick._

 

 

 

You hitch a ride back from Belgium with the resistance. This one was a quick trip; Dernier is off rigging railways with explosives, and Gabe and Monty are smuggling some arms to Denmark, so for once you don’t have to rush back. You’ll have time for a quick breather before you all press onward, into Germany and towards Austria. Steve has combined all the reports onto a map, and he thinks that Schmidt is in the Alps, somewhere along the border.

It’s useless speculation without a more specific location.  But it’s somewhere to point, for the time being.

The camp is quiet.  It’s cold, snow crusted a couple of inches thick on the ground, and everyone is in the small city down the road.  Their bars will do a roaring trade, if they can keep everyone stocked with alcohol. You want to find Steve first.

No. First you have to find the Colonel—or his secretary, rather, since the Colonel is off doing who knows what, it turns out, at this time of evening—and hand in your report, which you wrote in the back of the truck, propped on your knees, your fingers muffled in gloves. Pen clumsy.  He won’t have to read it, anyway; he already knows what it will say.

_Mission accomplished. Targets eliminated._

If the Colonel isn’t in, Steve won’t be either.  You’re not sure where you want to go, and you pause, trying to decide whether it’s worth it after all, going into town. To be around other people.

“Bucky Barnes,” he says behind you.  “As I live and breathe.”

You freeze, your gut congealing.  You want to take a steadying breath but you’d give yourself away, with the temperature what it is.  Instead you just turn around.  “What are you doing here?”

Simmons smiles a little.  “I’m on orders, what do you think?  We’re here to reinforce the line.”

His unit wasn’t at Azzano.  He was probably already gone by the time you came back.  He’s more Steve-like now than he used to be, or Steve is more like him than he used to be—still not the same, of course, but you’re caught flat-footed and raw, from days spent by yourself, thinking, and it’s still enough to set your nerves to jangling.  You remember how he tasted in the shed in Italy, in the mud and the rain.

“You’re famous, you know,” he adds.  “You and the rest of the Commandos.  I just about fell over when someone told me you weren’t dead after all.”

You cross your arms.  You can tell yourself that it’s because it’s cold.  “Well, it was a close call,” you say.  “Do you want something in particular?”

He just looks at you for a moment.  Your face is red.  You’re half-afraid and half-hopeful that he’ll answer like he did in the shed. It feels like treason, it feels like freedom.  You don’t know what to think anymore.

And he does answer like he did in the shed, but not the answer you were expecting.  “He’s the friend you were talking about,” he says.  “Steve Rogers.  Isn’t he?” When you don’t reply—can’t reply—he says, “I’m not going to tell anyone, or whatever you’re worried about. I basically knew as soon as I heard about you guys.”

You’re caught out, and cold, and lonely, and if Philips is here, Carter probably is too, and Steve always knows when Carter’s around.  And if you’re going to hate yourself anyway, you might as well, you think recklessly, have fun beforehand.  “You know, everyone else is in town getting drunk,” you say, casual.  “I think I have a bed around here somewhere.”

Simmons stares at you, eyes blinking wide, and says at last, “I should be upset that you’re blatantly using me as a stand-in for Captain America, but somehow I’m not.”

And it turns out that you’re easy, when you can trick yourself into thinking it’s Steve, something you should have learned in the shed months ago. It warms you up to your toes, tangled up with him in this bed you’ve never seen before, the operator gratefully giving up the controls, putting the meat-sack on automatic. If you both close your eyes, that’s all right.  You can’t be upset. He probably imagines that you’re a girl from back home.  And you imagine he’s Steve.  His shoulders are Steve’s shoulders, his back is Steve’s back, his hair is Steve’s hair, and you kiss him like you’re drowning, like the breath in his lungs is the only way you’ll survive.

You will loathe yourself when you come back.  But for now your body is flying high.

“You should probably say something,” he says later, pulling his clothes back on.  He looks for a stray sock under the cheap bed frame.  The Howling Commandos tend to get better accommodations, when they stay with the group.  Probably it’s because of Steve.

Steve.

You drag your hand over your face and say, “It’s not that simple.”

He shrugs.  “Maybe it’s not,” he agrees.  “I wouldn’t know. Maybe when I get home—but you make me feel sorry for you.  It can’t be healthy, acting like this—”

“Hasn’t killed me yet.”  You push yourself up.  Your muscles ache and pull and it’s almost a pleasant pain, your brain still drugged on pleasure, and you grab for your coat, chilly, now, and looking for some kind of armor. Some way to button it all back up. He can walk away, you know he can, because you’re some fun when he’s at war and away from the real world, and he’s not willingly going to tell people that he fucked you, because it’s war, it’s special circumstances, but everyone’s supposed to look the other way. You don’t talk about it. And it’ll never be worth the results, telling people that—well, telling people that you’d rather be fucking Captain America, but you settled for him instead.

“Maybe you’ve just been lucky.  I’m _not_ really saying anything,” he says quickly, holding up his hands, and you don’t even want to know what your face looks like then.  “It’s just an observation.  Is my belt over there?”

The belt’s still where you threw it.  You find it, toss it to him, pull on your pants while you’re at it. You’re cold again and you don’t know what you want.  You’re smart enough to know that you don’t want it from him.

Simmons doesn’t push you on it.  Neither of you are here for talking, when you’re perfectly honest, and it’s not worth a fight when he’s only barely an observer anyway.  He puts himself together and leaves, and doesn’t try to kiss you goodbye, and you’re absurdly grateful for something he’s probably just forgotten.  You’re at your limit, toeing the edge of a long fall, and you’re not sure what you would have done.

_Dear Steve, Most of the time I tell myself that Zola’s isolation ward set me off, and it’s okay to be so broken up after that, but if I’m honest with myself, really, truly honest, I lost it long before that.  What used to be bedrock is crumbling sand.  I can’t find my footing.  Something’s sucking at my feet and I can’t get free.  I don’t know what to do anymore, Steve.  I really don’t._

Maybe the cold air will drive the letters out of your head, like Simmons did in your temporary bed, or maybe it will lend some clarity, or maybe you just can’t stand to be in this room for another second.  You throw on the rest of your clothes. Realize, after you’re outside, that you’ve forgotten your gloves.

“Bucky,” Dum-Dum says, and in that freezing, crashing moment, when you look at his face, you can see that he knows everything.

 

 

 

Mom knows.  Probably she’s known all along, but she only starts acting like it towards the end, after Steve’s mother dies, after the funeral, after you make it clear that you’re going to get Steve out of that apartment, whatever it takes, and flip through the ads at the back of the paper before you go to the docks.  When you think back on it, later, with the benefit of long hindsight, she probably knows that first fall day, when you come home with split knuckles and every fact about Steve that you gathered while you walked him back to his front door, partly to keep those schoolyard bullies from getting any more bright ideas but mostly so you can do something about your fervent desire to become friends with this skinny, stubborn boy.  You’re nervous and excited and you chatter Mom’s ear off, your tongue running in circles, and eventually she says, “And _someone_ said he would _never_ make any new friends,” just to shut you up.

No, she knows for years, even before Steve.  She’s your mother; she knows everything.

Sometimes she just lets you forget that for a while.

“James,” she says today, before you can get out the door, and you stop in your tracks, startled, because she never calls you that.  She grabs your arm tight and looks straight into your eyes.  “ _Watch yourself_.  Do you hear me?”

A laugh stutters out of your throat.  “I don’t—”

“You wear your heart on your sleeve.  You always have.  But you _cannot_ live with Steve and carry on like you have been.”  You try to look away and she shakes you, fingers pressing bruises, until you stop. “No, you _listen to me_.  You have to bury that feeling deep and never, ever let on that it’s there, because the world will tear you apart if they find out—”

“Mom, I’m not,” you say, only you don’t know what you’re not, and you stop almost before you’ve begun.  You’re hot, prickling; you wish she would let you go.

“Don’t play dumb,” she snaps, a warning.  Her hand on your arm is fear.  “It doesn’t suit you.  It doesn’t suit me, either, and I’m tired of it, and would you—just do as you’re told, even once?  You’ll get yourself killed, or you’ll kill yourself—”

“I won’t _die_.  I won’t—it’s not like—”

“James Barnes,” she says, “I know very well what love _is_ and _isn’t_ like. Don’t you dare tell me I can’t see what’s right in front of me.  You have to learn how to hide it or everyone else will too.”

 

 

 

“Jesus, just take a drink,” Dum-Dum says in the barren mess hall.  “It’s not poisoned.”

It’s not poisoned because he’s drunk a quarter of it already. You don’t even know what _it_ is.  The bottle is clearly second-hand, a sturdy, heavy thing strong enough to ride along in a backpack without breaking.

You don’t want to take a drink, but he knows, he hasn’t brought it up yet, and maybe you need to be a little drunk for this conversation. You take a swig and thunk it back down on the table.

He has a cigar, somehow, pulled from some secret pocket while you weren’t looking, and he lights it now, flicking the spent match to the side. “This place is a lot warmer when everyone’s in here.  Take another drink, you need some color in your cheeks.  The food’s shit, of course, but food is food, I guess.” He puffs at it until the end glows red, apparently content, his big elbows resting on the table. He lets you hog the bottle. You decide that it might be brandy.

The quiet seems louder for the creak of Dum-Dum’s cigar and the slosh of the heavy green bottle, the scuff of your boot on the ground and the slight push of the wind against the sides of the tent.

“Aren’t you going to say anything?”  You roll the neck of the bottle between your fingers, watching the bottom twist on splintered wood.  It’s that or scream.  “I thought you dragged me here to _talk_.”

“Somebody has to,” he says.  “I guess it’s up to me.”  He looks at you, eyes disconcertingly blue in his big, ginger face, and you feel small and grubby and low.

You drop your head into your hands so you won’t have to see him. “Look, if you’re going to tell me to ask for a transfer, I’m not—“

“Well, that shows how much you know,” Dum-Dum says.  “I’m not going to tell you to get lost. Hell, I’d think you were an idiot if you did.  Not to mention that we’d all probably die within the week.”

“I think you are seriously underestimating your own ability to survive,” you say to the table.

“Also, that’s not the point.”  You hear the bench creak when he shifts.  “I was really close to one of my cousins when I was younger,” he says, out of nowhere.  “And I was just a little shit, too, at the time, so I don’t even know why he let me hang around. Pity, maybe.  He was my idol.  The first time I got drunk, I got _really_ drunk, trying to be like him.  Pete could drink the whole town under the table and still walk away afterwards. He was like you. Sometimes you didn’t notice, and most of the rest of the time you could wave it away as something else, and he was careful.  But after a while you knew anyway.”

“Did you pull the short straw or something?” you ask, aiming for neutral and falling a ways short, your voice cracking.

“Nah,” Dum-Dum says.  “The others would never say anything, if they can even put the words together in their heads.  Morita’s probably too drunk right now to even wonder where I am.  No, as soon as I saw you with that boy, I thought I’d better stick around.”

And you’d been careful, not touching Simmons until the door swung shut, not looking at him too much.  You bite your lip, force your jittering leg to still.

“War is hell enough without forcing yourself through more.” He’s waiting, you know what he’s waiting for, and finally you give in and look up, eyes hot and itching, and he’s serious and kind and exasperated all at once.  “And I’m sick of watching you cut yourself up over this.  It gets old real fast, I’ll have you know, and if you keep it up I _will_ box your ears.  Lighten up, Barnes. This isn’t something to die over.”

“I’m not going to die,” you say, irritated.  “What is it with everyone thinking I’m going to off myself? I _won’t_.” And it feels a little better to say this, to push that option off the table, like giving it voice will somehow bind you to that promise.

“Maybe you just seem the type to self-destruct,” Dum-Dum says, in a way that makes it abundantly clear that, yeah, a lot of people see you as a grenade with the pin pulled.  They’re just bracing themselves for the explosion.

“Well, I’m not,” you say.  Which is not exactly the ringing denial you would have wished for.

“And another thing,” he says, around the cigar, his eyes hard on your face. “If you think Rogers would leave you if he found out, you’re an idiot.  He marched into Austria by himself to rescue you.  I don’t think there’s anything you could tell him that would make him abandon you.  You’re stuck with him, Barnes.  Might as well man up and confess your love, get it out of the way.”

You stare at him in disbelief.  “I’m not—”

“Shut up,” he says.  “You are. And if you think I’m happy about getting stuck with the role of relationship counselor, you’re wrong about that, too.  Just tell him so I can get some sleep at night, okay?  You’re exhausting to watch.  Now pass the bottle.”

You push it across the table and say, “It’s not that easy,” before you can stop yourself.

“Pretty sure it’s not as hard as all that, though, either.”  Dum-Dum takes a big drink and wipes at his mouth with the back of his hand.  “Jesus, what do you want me to do, lend you a trashy romance novel?  Those’ll be hard to find in English over here.”

Groaning, you drop your forehead onto your hand.  “What the fuck did I do to deserve two speeches in one night?”

“You looked pathetic for too long,” he says.  He kicks your shin and you kick him back.  “Look, kid.  Bottling it up doesn’t do you any good.  Worst-case scenario, Rogers tries to play matchmaker with some other poor soul.  Best-case scenario, you work it out and move on with your life.  But at least it won’t be festering inside, you know?”

“Dugan, you have the soul of a poet,” you say, just to make him scowl.

“You’ve forced my hand.  This is what you get.”  He hands the bottle back and you take the hint, drink some more.  “And Barnes?  At least you have good taste in men.”

You choke on the brandy.  You force it down your burning throat and start coughing, trying to breathe, putting the bottle down so you won’t drop it or knock it over.  “Fuck you,” you force out, sounding like Steve after one of his many asthma attacks.

Dum-Dum shrugs, unperturbed, and stubs his cigar out on the bench. “I’m not interested, but thanks all the same.”  He nods at the bottle. “Drink some more, you’ll feel better.  Try not to drown.”

You do as you’re told.

 

 

 

You can’t stop thinking about it.  What you’d say, how you’d say it.  If maybe Mom was wrong after all and it’s better to wear your heart on your sleeve, rather than tearing it off and pushing it into your pocket.  If it would kill this darkness in you, saying the words out loud.

Winter is your breath on the wind and hoping that the rifle won’t seize up, and coming up with alternatives in case it does.

Winter is snow and small fires and sitting tight next to Steve, fussing over whether he’s wearing his gloves, or if his shoes are still waterproof, and does he remember to keep his helmet on?

“Bucky, I haven’t even had a _cold_ since the serum,” he says finally, exasperated, fending you off even though you’ve hardly said anything.

“And you’d better not start now,” you retort.  “Put on your damn gloves, Steve.”

“I don’t need them,” he says.  He grabs your hands to demonstrate, the calluses from guns and the shield rough against your knuckles, and you can’t quite tell whether he really is warm or if you’re just flushing.  “Where are _yours?_   What happens if you get frostbite, huh? We’ll all get stabbed and it’ll be your fault.”

“I’m not cold,” you snap, pulling your hands free, and it’s true, you’re not, you haven’t been in a long time.  But he glares at you, angry and righteous in that way only Steve is, and you sigh, find your gloves in your pocket.

Winter is a lot of things.  But mostly winter is you lying awake at night, curled tight with your back to Steve’s, wondering if you’re brave enough to remember you at thirteen years old, on the fire escape, and if you have the words to say what he felt that day, if that’s even something that can be done.

 

 

 

_Steve,_

_This is going to sound crazy no matter how I say it, I think that’s just something I have to accept.  I was never good with words like you.  You can give these speeches right off the top of your head and people will follow you to death’s door—especially now, when they actually take the time to listen to what you have to say.  I could listen to what you have to say all day and all night and for as long as you cared to talk, but then, I was a lost cause years ago._

_There’s so many letters I’ve almost written to you, Steve.  I guess instead of talking to myself I talk to you. The day after my first battle, I actually wrote it down, and then I tore it up.  I’m afraid that people would read them. Especially you. I’m afraid of what you would think of me._

_Here’s what I’m thinking.  I’m thinking of the day we went to the beach, thousands of years ago, it seems like, and we took the train there and back, remember?  And you’re so tired after fighting the sand all day that you fall asleep against my shoulder, and all I want to do is put my arm around you and hold you close.  I almost do it, too, because with the swaying of the train I might have an excuse, but I’m scared of what I’ll do, I’m scared that when you wake up and look up at me I might not be able to help myself.  So I don’t.  But I dream about it for weeks, sometimes just daydreaming, sometimes actual dreams, and sometimes they’re terrible but sometimes they’re wonderful, just you and me and what I imagine kissing you would be like._

_I’ve been hung up on you since I was ten years old, the day we first met. I was so excited to see you again. I ambushed you on the way to school and scared you, I think, maybe because you thought I was one of the boys from the day before, but I just wanted to be friends, it was this desperate burning thing inside me and I wouldn’t rest until I got what I wanted. Maybe if I were normal that would be it, but I don’t think anyone can know you without falling in love with you, at least a little bit._

_Your Carter makes me want to break things, but I think she knows you too. It’s no wonder she likes you so much.  She met you before the serum, didn’t she?  Some people only see you the way you are now.  But I remember how you used to be and I love him, too. I wanted you long before you could bench-press cars._

_Not that I object to you being strong and healthy and admired far and wide, of course.  But if I’m going to be honest, perfectly honest, you as you were would have been more than enough for me._

 

 

 

“Bucky,” Steve says, at the base of the stairs, where you’re tucked in a blown-out upstairs room, pen and paper against your knees, gloves in your pocket so you don’t smear more than you usually do. There’s ink all over your left hand.

“What is it, Steve?”  You carefully don’t jump, don’t startle, don’t immediately fold the letter up to hide it. He’ll just get curious. And you’re not ready yet, not sure you’ll ever be ready, that saying the words won’t be like the worst kind of torture.

“Morita got something on the radio,” Steve says.  “Zola’s wanted in Austria ASAP.  He’s taking the train.”

“Shit,” you say.  “Do we know where to go?”

“Yeah, Monty’s pulling together some transport.”  Steve’s eyes burn into yours, even across the distance, the darkness.  “We have to go now.”

“Okay. Give me ten seconds.”

Steve nods and disappears, back out into the snow.

You carefully fold the letter and put it in the pocket on the inside of your coat.  Then you grab your rifle and follow him, just like you always do, and even the cold metal doesn’t sting your palm.

 

 

 

The winter Steve nearly dies, God lets him live.

You know for sure when Mom says one morning, while she’s scrounging for something in the cupboard, anything to send you all off to school with, like it’s an afterthought, “Oh, and Bucky, Mrs. Rogers says it’s all right if you want to go see Steve this afternoon.  _After_ school,” she says sharply, when you almost come out of your chair, your heart leaping so high you think it might end up on the table in front of you.

“But I haven’t—”

“—Seen him in weeks, _I know_. Sit down.  You will go to class, and I will be checking with your teacher later this week, so don’t you even think about it.”

Your sisters snigger.  You glare at them.  _Their_ friends weren’t dying three weeks ago. They don’t understand, and Mom doesn’t understand, either.

As a compromise, you stay in school until lunch.  Then you skip down the familiar path to Steve’s apartment, breath hard and hurting from the cold, take the stairs so fast you almost slip, rap at the door.

Mrs. Rogers isn’t surprised to see you.  “Bucky,” she says.  “I might have known.”  But she smiles when she says it, like she’s smiling at a lot of things these days and can’t seem to help herself.

“Can I come in?” you ask, suddenly shy, suddenly too-conscious of how fast you’re breathing, your messy hair.  She inspires these kinds of worries often.

She steps aside.  “You know where to go.”

And you do, you’ve just been afraid that you’d never be allowed to go there again.  Steve’s always in his mother’s room, when he’s sick, where there’s a real bed and more room for a doctor or a priest to sit by his bedside.  He’s propped up on some pillows now, white and thinner than ever, and on his lap he has the book you lent him before he got sick.

His face lights up when he sees you, the warmth of summer in the coldest month of the year, and says, “Bucky!”

You love that he’s not dead, you love how he’s fighting to stay awake, you love that he remembered the book, you love his hair stuck to his forehead, you love his hands holding the pages open, you love _him._

Maybe he sees some of this in your face, he sees _something_ , because his smile softens and he says, “Hey, I wasn’t gonna die. I promised you that years ago.”

And you’re able to push down the tears and bound to his side, dropping into the chair they wouldn’t let you sit in, the weeks they weren’t sure, and grin so wide you think your face might split in half.  “Yeah, no need to _almost_ pull it off to prove it, Rogers,” you say cheerfully.  “I believe you.”

“You’re skipping school, aren’t you,” he says.

“You, Steve Rogers, are talking to a budding juvenile delinquent,” you drawl, slouching in your chair, and ruin your bad-boy persona by laughing out loud. Flying high.  Ready to spend the rest of the day, the rest of the week, the rest of the year, the rest of a lifetime sitting right there, next to Steve.

But you’d trade all of that in a heartbeat just to keep him breathing. Alive.  Safe.

That’s the deal.

 

 

 

Here’s what will happen:

Steve leans out far enough, fast enough, catches your wrist, and it’s the two of you against the wind and the drop, and Steve’s stronger than both of those.

You land hard inside the train and you can breathe again, you can choke on it. The hole screams by your feet. Screams uselessly and too late, because now you’re both safe.

You roll over, push yourself up, enough, so when Steve lurches to his feet you grab him and kiss him, fear and exhilaration singing, meat-sack and operator for once in agreement.

Maybe he startles and pushes you away.

Maybe he kisses you back.

 

 

 

Here’s what does happen:

You and the rail fall hard and fall fast.

The meat-sack claws at the air, like maybe it will turn out to be solid and it can catch hold.  Stupidly puts out one arm to stop the fall.

The operator thinks, in that second before splintering impact, _But I—_

 

 

 

You’re looking up at him, and there’s snow in his hair and fear and desperation on his face, and then you can’t see him at all for the distance, and it’s the first day of winter.

**Author's Note:**

> This wasn't supposed to be this long, but _somebody_ turned out to be a chatterbox.
> 
> I am the World's Worst at finishing anything, but ideally (eventually) (maybe) there will be more to this. At the moment, we're looking at two more parts. So keep your fingers crossed, hope for the best, maybe we'll get a conclusion for this. (It'll be happy, I swear! I'm a sucker for happy endings.)
> 
> I was going to wait to put this up until I had at least one of the others done but... eh.
> 
> In other news, I've watched _Political Animals_ and _Kings_ and that has really not helped with my Bucky Interpretation. Or my inarticulate rage at being left hanging. Fiends!


End file.
